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Robin Mo 💬's avatar

Brilliant. Something I've thought about as well, that individual art pieces (digitally reproduced) hath become a commodity. The art itself now isn't what it used to be, but it's now in the decisive overall vision and aesthetic of a brand; in a certain feel, perhaps? Is that what you mean with "artistry has zoomed out"? Thanks for writing all of this out.

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Jae Lubberink's avatar

Exquisite piece. The question of whether AI can truly author aesthetics, rather than merely generate them, is pertinent. AI is shifting the metaphysical properties that qualify art as ‘art’ from technical perfection to the human plight in creating the artefact itself. Confusing aesthetic generation with true authorship mistakes the map for the territory.

"The digital age has brought creative abundance, and AI accelerates this shift. If machines can execute any artistic technique flawlessly, what’s left for humans? AI can generate aesthetics, but can it truly author them? … Art requires faith that the creator has something to say (and AI cannot speak)."

Had a similar musing in my first essay, where I argue that the necessary condition of taste is epistemological effort—but I think you can use any verb interchangeably so long as it encompasses the human process of its creation:

“While LLMs can mirror the mechanics of epistemological methods to high standards of logical validity, they are yet to replicate the epistemology of human inference in culture markets. Masters of Socratic inquiry, they can perform syntactic deeds perfectly—but they lack semantic grounding. Acquiring taste is antithetical to LLMs because it requires irreducible elements of human epistemology. When ChatGPT generates a sonnet ‘in the style of Shakespeare,’ it doesn’t grapple with the existential weight of Macbeth or the hormonal frenzy of Romeo and Juliet. It apes patterns and arranges syntax from cosmic gulfs of context, but is blind to the human struggle that birthed it. Optimising for taste, through the use of LLMs, denies our capacity to cultivate new sensibilities—we are left merely to cater to old ones.”

Since AI has perfected the endpoints, aesthetics, culture, and taste are now about the journey rather than the destination. It's about the verb, not the noun—because 'doing' part is inherently human.

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